Don't Let This Mistake Cost You Your Retirement

Well, hey there. This is Craig Weir. Welcome back to the channel. You know, the stock market is up nearly 30% last year and it was so it's a huge year for investors. But years like this bring their own set of challenges, especially for those that maybe have got a million or more staved away, whether it's in your IRAs or your other accounts because the numbers are much bigger and it seems to matter a lot more Today, I'm going to walk you through the biggest risks that could quietly undermine your investment success and your retirement success. The reason that this matters right now is we're just coming off of a really strong market. And when, when you have strong market years, emotions run really high. Hidden fees are often easy to go unnoticed and there's a temptation to kind of chase performance. And that happens just suddenly and it just kind of creeps into the way you think and the way you make decisions. So if you're almost retired or you're already drawing from your ira, avoiding these three mistakes I'm going to go through over the next three series really becomes even more critical. Please remember our role is to educate, to analyze and to provide evaluation. We do not manage investment portfolios, we don't sell investment or insurance products. So I try to just give you a purely educational look behind the curtain to help you protect your retirement. I want to share the three big risks for you in a short three part series. So you can kind of consume them in small bite sized pieces and pick them up whenever you want to pick them up. I've had almost 40 years of offering advice to people, managing investments, watching people, how they make decisions, sitting in on conferences, reading all this stuff. And it doesn't make me any better than anybody else. I just have seen a lot and I've, I've, I've seen what works over and over. My sample set is, are thousands of people as opposed to just my own investments and some friends or something like that. I also know when it's time to consider changing advisors and we're not going to get into that in these videos. I have a resource I'm going to offer to you at the end of each of these videos that you can download for free and you can kind of learn more about these risks as well as the when to know when it's maybe time to consider different advisors. But let's focus in on the risk for right now. So the first risk is really just emotional decision making in retirement. So here's the problem. As I've already kind of said, when the market surges by almost 30% like it did last year, it feels tempting to buy more chase returns. But what happens to you if the market drops? So we've had two years in a row, we've had great returns. We may get a third and a fourth, I don't know. But when it drops, those of you listening to this, because I know how we get to target our YouTube marketing and our video marketing, you're, you've been around the block a few times, you've seen the big drops and, and they always drop eventually. Sometimes that's no big deal. Other times there people react very emotionally and they make emotional decisions like over buying now or selling in a panic later. And both of those can undo years and years of steady progress. So there's a firm called Dalbar. Dalbar is an independent firm. And they, they, they did a study recently that showed that the average investor underperformed the S&P 500 by five and a half percent last year. Now it isn't because they picked bad investments. It's because they made emotional decisions at the wrong time. So in retirement, something called a sequence of returns of risk matters. So if you're withdrawing during a market downturn that follows a big up year, then those emotional decisions can permanently reduce your portfolio's recovery potential if you're withdrawing funds at it. So you gotta be guard yourself against the emotions of picking investments or putting too much in or varying from what your game plan was and what you felt like you really needed to make retirement work. And a good financial plan will help you understand what your target return should be year after year after year. And that should inform and dictate kind of how your investments go. But a year like this that we had last year gives you really a great opportunity to evaluate are your emotions guiding your decisions. So I'd like you to have kind of the key takeaway is that business big market years don't happen every year. And protecting your wealth really means locking in progress, avoiding unnecessary risk and focusing on what truly works over a long period of time. I've got a free ebook titled 3 biggest risks to your portfolio and 3 criteria to know if it's time to switch managers. You can find the link to that down in the notes here underneath the video or on this page someplace, depending on how we use all this. So I hope that helps. And stay tuned. Subscribe to the channel and you'll know when the next risk is covered and the third one and subsequent stuff. So if you like this kind of stuff, just education, click the like button and let us know that you did like it and appreciate you paying attention to this stuff. And I hope it's of help to you. Take care.